Category: places

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Thursday 16 May 2013 – Here I am

Cafe table with iced coffee by the River Vltava, with Prague Castle in the background

I arrive at the main station in Prague at 9.30AM, after an 11 hour night train journey from Cologne, to be met by a little slip of a girl (Jitka) from the language school, who can just about manage my tote bag of bits and pieces, while I lug the backpack and suitcase through two metro journeys, one bus ride, and a 5 minute uphill walk from the bus stop to ‘the TEFL house’. At least my room is on the ground floor.

The accommodation is a large but not exceptional residential house built on the hill. The front door is lower than the road, so although my room is on the right of the door, the view through the window is of people’s feet on the pavement. As well as two floors above mine, there are steps down to a basement which holds another bedroom and a large kitchen-dining room with patio doors at the back opening out onto an unkempt garden and paved area with barbecues.

So far I’ve met four of my fellow-trainees, all American, all quite a lot younger than me, one couple and two other young men. There are four or five more to come.

After I’ve showered and changed, I go out walking. There doesn’t seem to be much to see around the house, so I take the bus down to the shopping mall near the Metro station and set off exploring from there. The sun’s bright, but with a surprisingly chilly wind, and I don’t trust the sky. I start by getting lost – I make it a policy to get lost on my first day in a new place, so I can get my bearings. But I have a travel pass for public transport, a map, and details of the buses

I stop in a quiet square and sit on a bench with the intention of checking the map, but at that moment the sun comes out, so I sit and let it warm my face, watching the trams, the people, and the birds, and thinking what a joy it is to be in a place where it’s normal for people to sit out in public reading books rather than glaring at their phones.

The weather gets hotter, or at least relatively so by comparison with Cologne, Brussels (where I was on Tuesday) and home. I haven’t a clue where I’m walking, but in a city of hills with a river passing through the middle it’s not hard to work out that going downhill should eventually take you towards the main artery. I soon find myself leaning on a concrete wall over-looking the River Vltava, watching the constant traffic of boats, counting bridges, and trying to work out which way is most likely to lead towards the Old Town – or more importantly, a cafe. With the twin towers of the cathedral at the top of the bank opposite, instinct tells me to head left, past the first bridge (a concrete construction covered with traffic) and beyond that to the statue-and-tourist encrusted Charles Bridge. I find a place to sit on the river bank with an iced coffee and marvel at the fact that I’m here, and who knows when I’ll be leaving?

In the shopping mall near the Metro station there’s a large Tesco where I shop for essentials, and then catch the bus back to the house. I’ve unpacked and distributed stuff round my little room – I’ll be staying here for a whole month, after all.

Friday 17 May 2013 To the Castle – (or not)

I’m breakfasting in the communal basement kitchen on grapefruit juice, yogurt, bread and jam and black tea (no milk – I forgot to buy any). Jacob, one of the American boys, has just come in through the patio doors from eating his breakfast outside to announce that ‘it’s hot’. Already.

Jitka said it’s possible to walk to the Castle, so that’s my mission for today. I struggle a bit with the incline, but console myself that at least it will be downhill on the way back. I seem to be just trudging through more residential areas, all houses and a noticeable dearth of tempting cafes and worse still, tram routes. I tell myself the views will be amazing when I get there (wherever ‘there’ is), but right now I can’t see past the houses.

I come to a crumbling closed down sports stadium, and a path in front of a wooded area behind a chain-link fence. There’s a way in between the trees, to a park with paths, streams, a fish pond with a fountain in the shape of a seal, and views over rooftops and distant river-bridges. It has to be Petrin Park, where I walked on a Sunday in June last year.

Sitting on a bench, on the top of the park, on top of the world. Below me, white walls, red roofs, copper-green domes and spires, bells ringing, trees and trees and trees, in light, dark, bursting, glorious leaf. Is there any other city which is built inside a forest, as this one seems to be? I wonder what it’s like in autumn? I’ll find out. I can see the castle at last, although I can’t work out how to get there. That’s for another day.

Further along, I find the rose garden, where the buds are just starting to open, and feel the excitement bubble up as I realise that I am here and can come as many times as I want over the summer to see these beautiful places. There’s no rush.

I head downhill to the river, cross the bridge and turn right. There are steps leading down to the lower embankment, where there’s an outdoor cafe, wooden tables by the river, a bar and barbecue and a sign saying: ‘Live music every day 15.00 – 22.00’. I settle myself on a bench right by the water’s edge. There is a middle-aged white guy with grey dreadlocks trailing down his back, playing the guitar and singing ‘Black Magic Woman’. A waiter comes over and I order a hot dog from the barbecue and a pint of Staropramen. The wind whips up a spray from the river, but the sun is warm as I sip my beer and watch the swallows dipping to catch insects from the surface. A swan lumbers up into the air with a mighty flapping of wings, then flops down again a few metres upriver. I watch a tourist boat passing, and trams crossing the bridge, smiling to myself every time the guitarist starts another song that comes back to me from the past, and I silently mouth the words to myself and love the fate that has brought me here.

In the evening – after another trip to Tesco on my way back – I spend some time chatting online to my daughter, and then typing up some notes about my impressions so far. About an hour ago I realised I hadn’t had any dinner, so went to the kitchen and got myself a cheese sandwich and a glass of Moravian red. The Czechs are really better known for their beer, but I’m determined to give it a chance.

Linda Rushby, The Long Way Back (WIP)

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Remembering Torino

View from the Basilica Of Superga over Turin and the Alps beyond

Sunshine on the Po – Sunday 22 April 2012

Walking through a shower of blossom.
Sitting on planks over the river drinking a coffee.
Sunday morning market along the Murrazzi.
Two sparrows squabbling, making enough noise for an army.
White lion guarding the base of Garibaldi’s statue.
Light glinting off the river.
Car horns on the bridge, boats on the river.
Ducks swimming and a bloom of brown blossom petals on the surface.
A couple slow dancing under the arches of a bridge, the woman softly crooning.
A black crow perches on a white log in the river, pecking at something invisible.
Everything is good. Sun on my face. The river, purposeful yet calm, unhurried.

Cafe tables on a terrace by the River Po, Turin, Italy

I cross the river, and catch the bus to Sassi, then the old rack railway up the mountain. On the train from Florence, before we reached the city, I noticed this white Baroque church, perched on the top of a mountain, with no apparent reason for being there. When the train reaches the top of the hill, I can do nothing but marvel and point my camera. Round central tower in yellow stucco, surrounded by classical white pillars and porticoes, topped with a grey dome housing the bell. However high I am, I’m always driven to go higher, so in the yellow church I climb the steps up to the top of the tower and look down on the terracotta roof of the nave. The white peaks of the mountains surround and mesmerise me.

Notes from a mountain – Monday 23 April 2012

Ilze’s back at work today.

‘Why not take the train into the mountains? she suggests. ‘It takes 29 minutes to get to Avigliana and 1 hour 22 minutes to Bandonecchia’.

I get out at Avigliana and walk around the town. There doesn’t seem much to see and I’m not sure what I’m looking for. I walk towards a church, past some pretty old buildings, along a road out of the town and up a hill. Along a path through woods to a spot by a small stone tower with a view out over the valley and towards the bigger mountains. I’ve brought a picnic of bits and pieces, a salad of cherry tomatoes and mozzarella left over from last night’s dinner, a packet of Tuc biscuits bought from the trolley-man on a train somewhere (Rome to Florence, I think, or Florence to Turin), a Bounty, an apple and a Ritter sport with nuts. A feast. This seems like a good place to eat it.

Sometimes I find myself in a place, and I don’t really know why I’m there or what I should be doing or where I am exactly. Most often, it’s in a city. Today it’s on the side of a mountain. Not a big, glamorous mountain, I don’t know its name, maybe it doesn’t have one. It’s just part of the great chain of mountains, I guess, a fractal part of something bigger, where does it end and where does the something else begin?

In the valley below me is a house with a balcony and steps up to a terrace above part of the ground floor. Earlier I saw a person moving and then an animal, I think a cat, though it could have been a dog (hard to judge size from here) walking across the terrace. On the walk up here from the station I was thinking about the similarity of the Latin words for the cat family, Felis, and for happiness or good fortune, felicitas. And it seems appropriate, so I wonder if it’s coincidence or if there is some deep connection in the roots of language.

There seems to be someone on the balcony, leaning on the rail, but they haven’t moved for a while, so maybe it’s not a person at all. Or maybe they’re looking and thinking: ‘there’s a person up there, sitting on a rock up on the side of the mountain’.

Now there’s a car, or a white van, moving away from the house. I can hear birds all around, and distant traffic, an intermittent sound that could be humming if it was more regular, maybe someone chopping logs. A plane. Sounds that could be thunder in the mountains but hopefully is just more planes.

Into the soundscape comes a train. I wonder if it’s going towards Bardonecchia or back to Turin. Whichever, I’ve missed it now.

from Single to Sirkeci, by Linda Rushby

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Carcassonne, Saturday 17 March 2012

Bienvenue à Carcassonne

There’s something raucous going on further down the platform, maybe the French version of a hen party, people in brightly coloured curly wigs making loud screechy noises. Outside the station, entrance roads are cordoned off, lots of police standing around, and police cars. Then I see a banner with the word ‘Carnaval’ on it, and today’s date.
I dodge out of the way of the reversing police van, and realise I’m standing at the taxi rank – exactly what I want. After the farce in Sète I’m not taking any more chances with buses.
A taxi pulls up and I show the driver my notebook with the address, neatly written in block capitals. He frowns and shakes his head. Pulls out a map and starts opening it, folding it, unfolding it, studying it. Takes my notebook and stares hard at it, then throws it down on the passenger seat, shaking his head some more. Turns the map upside down and looks at it again. Speaks into his radio mic, then puts it back.
‘They’ll call me in 5 minutes.’
‘You’re a taxi driver, for goodness sake!’ I want to shout at him. ‘Don’t
you know your own city?’
He picks up the notebook again and holds it against the map, then takes the mic and speaks into it some more. At last he nods, smiles, hangs up, passes me back my notebook.
‘It’s okay! It’s okay! We go!’
On the radio someone is talking in excited tones, it sounds like a sports commentary, and I hear the word ‘Angleterre’, then voices singing the Marseillaise. Can’t help humming along – wait a minute, maybe it’s a rugby match, England versus France. Mid-March, time for the Six Nations. From the singing, it doesn’t sound too good for our lads.


Within 10 minutes we’ve reached the mediaeval city walls. There’s a barrier across the road, the sort that lifts up to let the traffic through. We stop.
‘It’s in there’ he gestures through the gate. ‘Place de Saint-Jean.‘
‘What?’ That’s as far as he’s taking me?
He points up the cobbled street, then at the meter.
I walk past the barrier, through the crowds of tourists around the gate. What if it’s like Mont Saint-Michel, all those steps? My heart sinks.
I pass a one-man band, in cod-mediaeval costume and with his nose painted red, sitting in an alcove. Narrow cobbled streets, the Wardrobe bumping and grumbling behind me. Alleys lead off in all directions, no signposts, I just keep going, with no idea where to. Past cafés and tourist-tat shops, a set of stocks with a dummy in a shabby wig, a well, a haunted house. Looking for Le Logis des Remperts, 3, rue du Moulin D’Avar.

At the Place de Saint-Jean, I can’t see any signs. I double back on myself, and in the next street, outside the Haunted House, there’s a map. The Rue du Moulin is in the opposite corner of the square, a narrow alleyway, and on the left, a sign reading ‘Le Logis des Remperts’. A gate leads into a small courtyard, with loungers, plant pots, table and chairs, and a door in the wall. I knock, but there’s no response.
I get the laptop out of the bag and set it up on the table, looking for the details. No luck. I must not have saved it. And I can’t get online to recheck the email. But there’s a phone number.

‘There should be somebody there but maybe they didn’t hear you.’ The nice lady gives me the security code for the key pad. ‘I think you’re in room 1.’
I tap in the code, and open the door. Inside, Room 1 is to my left, on the ground floor mercifully, and the key is in the lock. I open the door and let myself in.
Bare stone walls, a double bed, sofa, table, microwave, fridge and sink in the corner. Tea, coffee and instant hot chocolate. Milk, butter and orange juice in the fridge.
Outside, I take a few steps down the street, turn left and find myself out on the city walls. A chilly wind blows over my face in the drizzly afternoon, up here on the hillside. Past the cream stone blocks and crenellations, I look down on the red-roofed white apartment blocks and churches of the modern town, dotted with bare winter trees and dark evergreens, the river snaking through its valley, and in the distance the white-speckled pyramids of the mountains, under low grey clouds.


Wandering around the old town, it’s hard to keep my bearings – too many little winding streets, full of cafes, restaurants, crêperies, shops selling jewellery, wine, local delicacies, post cards, arts and crafts, toys, books and so on and on. That looks like a good café, must pop back later for a hot chocolate. Which way now? What’s round this corner? Oh – I’m pretty sure I saw that shop window with the twee fairy figurines half an hour ago – how did I get back here? And where’s that café?


I’m back at the Rue du Moulin again. Might as well pop in and see if someone’s turned up.
They didn’t say I was supposed to wait for them, did they? I used my credit card to book the room online, I guess that’s good enough.
There’s a leaflet of events on the hall table, with a list of amazing acts performing in the Carnaval. Never mind the mediaeval city, I really must have fallen into a time-warp: Johnny Halliday (is he really still alive? Or is it some kind of character franchise, like Dr Who or James Bond?); The Alan Parsons Project; Duran Duran.


The crowds are thinning out now, but I’m still walking. Back at the drawbridge the one-man-band is still in his niche. There’s something particularly tuneless and irritating about his efforts, but he seems happy enough.
I follow the sound of much more tuneful and interesting music. A group in mediaeval costumes are performing, dancing, juggling, all very festive, but no sign of Johnny Halliday.
The crêperies and shops are starting to close, outside displays being taken in, shutters closing over windows. I get my chocolat chaud, but almost have the table cleared away under me.


I walk onto the ramparts and watch the changing colours of the clouds, from grey to pink, purple and red. As the sun sinks the world turns chilly, but somewhere a blackbird is singing. My phone has run out of battery, but after all, no camera can really capture that feeling of watching a beautiful sunset.

From ‘Single to Sirkeci‘, Linda Rushby

Le Logis des Remperts – my home for two nights, under cloud and sunshine.

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Wind on My Face

Monday morning, sunny, I walked to the rock gardens again, like last week. I was later than usual – didn’t leave home till after eight – so instead of taking a flask, I went to the kiosk and bought tea and a bacon bap and took them to my favourite bench, passing the café on the way, and noticing that the doors were open, although I thought it wasn’t open until nine. Maybe it was special early opening for today. Still, I was okay in the garden. I’d also noticed, after I ordered tea, that the kiosk is run by a coffee shop I’ve been to a couple of times, so their coffee is probably decent coffee – normally I avoid buying it from the kiosks because I assume it will be instant. Of course, decaff is often instant anyway, but next time I go that way I’ll ask.

In the gardens I went to check on the fish in the pond. I saw the two big fellas – one black, one coppery – and looked out for the tadpoles clustering along the edge – there were still some, but not as many as before. I walked round to the other bit of the pond, below the waterfall, and saw a man holding a camera. I paused and realised why – I don’t remember there being a plastic heron over the other side of the pond before, and then it moved its head. The first time I saw the tadpoles, I remember being amazed by how many there were, and then thinking: ‘if a heron finds them, it could clear this lot’.

Something I was thinking of yesterday in the context of plans and failure was a story my therapist told me on Thursday, about a past client from years ago who, towards the end of her therapy, revealed something about her life that she hadn’t mentioned because, as the therapist said, it ‘didn’t fit in with the story’. I’ve been wondering what she meant by that: was it just to tell me that things can change, however stuck and entrenched they feel, or was she suggesting that I’m holding back something because it doesn’t fit my ‘story’, either from her or maybe from myself?

I haven’t expressed that very well, and now I can’t see the connections with the planning thing, though I’m sure there was one. If I keep writing, maybe it will come to me.

Then there was that quote about ‘living your way into a new kind of thinking…’ rather than ‘…thinking your way into a new kind of living…’ (I had to look it up again) which also seems relevant. That seems to me to put the emphasis on doing (living) rather than planning (thinking) – so that doing something – whether that be knitting or other crafts, writing, walking, gardening, even a jigsaw – is better for me than when I am thinking about what those actions are leading to, or how best to do them – which sounds either very profound or utterly banal.

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Life and Writing

I was going to go to the beach, out for breakfast and then to the shop on the way home, but it was raining. I got up and went to look out of the window, and thought: ‘That’s a large cat sitting on the flat roof of the sheds behind the back wall’, then it got up and turned so I could see it sideways on, and I realised it was a fox. That’s the second time I’ve seen one in the last few months.

There was quite a storm in the night, I heard the wind at one point, it was really wild. It looked as though the rain was settling in for the day, but now the sun’s shining. Still, it will take a while before the benches dry out, and it’s not worth going out to sit on a damp bench to eat breakfast, plus the cafés will be getting pretty full by this time, so I’ll stay here and write.

I was going to write some more about planning and failing, but in the shower I started thinking about ‘The Long Way Back’ again. I said I would start work on it when I’d finished my proof reading job, then I read a few old blog posts and got very depressed remembering those times, and now it looks as though I’m going to be pretty tied up with family things until the middle of next week (or the week after next, depending on when you think ‘this week’ starts) which gives another delay to getting properly started, and when the cafes are properly open I can take my laptop somewhere to get stuck in, which is always a nice way to do it.

I have been ‘planning’ and procrastinating over this for so long now, years in fact. I came to the end of the pre-Prague section early in 2018, I remember it quite distinctly. I went to the café where I used to go for breakfast on Sunday, before the writing group meetings (not one of my usual writing cafes, but it was en route to the dentist, where I’d been for an appointment) and took with me printouts of the early Prague posts, which is when I had the idea that there was just too much, and maybe I’d write a separate book about my time in Prague. Or was that 2019?

This is the problem with writing autobiography – though ‘S2S’ and ‘TLWB’ are strictly speaking memoirs, the distinction being that an autobiography is the story of a whole life, but memoirs are just a specific part of a life, either in terms of time or of an interest which may cover different periods. But as a memoirist, I find it hard to see how an autobiography can ever be finished, unless the author is still writing it on their deathbed (which in my case might well happen).

Life feeds writing, and writing feeds life, like Ouroboros, the snake that eats its own tail.

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Decisions

Today I have a decision to make.

It’s not earth-shattering – it’s this: should I take my camper van to the country park, have a walk through the trees and a picnic? Should I go to B&Q, buy some compost and plants, come home and do some gardening? Should I do both, drive the camper van to B&Q en route to the country park and hope to find a parking place not too far from home when I get back, so it’s not too much of an effort to carry the compost etc home? Should I take the car (camper van too tricky to park) and go to the garden centre that’s en route to the country park (if I can remember where it is, I’ve only been a couple of times, and that was years ago), and if I do, does my parking season ticket for the country park cover the car as well?

Yesterday I bought rolls and individually wrapped flap jacks in preparation for this picnic that I was planning. But – isn’t the country park getting a bit boring? I don’t want to drive the other way, to the New Forest, because that is a full day out, and does mean driving along the M27, which can be stressful. And putting the van back into the garage is always stressful. It’s only a couple of weeks since I moved the van, so it shouldn’t have seized up yet – though I did leave the battery connected up in the expectation that I’d be taking it out again in the near future. I won’t be taking it out next week, though, because I’m going up to Bedford – on the train, because hopefully my daughter will be bringing me back to stay a few days and help with sorting out the study.

I was going to go to B&Q because I have a coupon, and Wednesday is Diamond Card day, but of course you can’t combine the offers, and anyway if you read the small print the coupon only applies if you spend £30 on full price items, so it’s not great if you want to combine lots of small things, when some of them are likely to be on multi-buys anyway, so I’d spend all my time trying to work out what to spend it on.

I like the idea of going to the garden centre, but from what I remember the parking is pretty awful, so as I said, I wouldn’t want to take the van.

I’m just trying to give examples here of what my mind is like all the time. I think I’ll give myself a treat, but it takes so long to think through all the options, implications, ramifications and potential consequences that I start to dread it, even when the object is something I know I would enjoy – unless, of course, I don’t enjoy it at all and end up wondering what on earth I’m doing there, wherever it is. Which is quite likely.

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Finding the Way (or not)

Now my proof-reading job has finished, I was planning to get on with ‘The Long Way Back’. But I’ve reached the time when I was in Prague, and even starting to read back the blog posts from that time has reminded me of how stressed I was over the teaching course, interviews, flat, etc, not to mention the accident when I fell on my face and the problems with my teeth. There’s a story there to be told, but it’s not a very cheerful one, nor is the year that followed it, and I’m back with a sense of not wanting to touch it, as I had the last time I tried, three years ago. But if I leave it like that, I guess in a way it will always haunt me, and I have to draw a line under it somehow.

Yesterday I ended by quoting from a post on a Facebook group for dyspraxics which bothered me, about how people like me should stop apologising and feeling ashamed, and sorry for ourselves. That is me in a nutshell, right there, but how do I stop? If I am to be true to my nature, that is how I have always been, and always will be. I can’t be strong and proud of myself, because this is who I am, this is my lived experience: that I try things, mess them up, break things, am constantly late, messy, chaotic, forgetful, all those things. I read other people’s posts on the group, where they talk about repeatedly failing at interviews, hopelessly looking for jobs but never being accepted for anything that matches their qualifications, getting bullied at work and at home for being slow, chaotic, etc, and so on, and so forth. Is it so surprising that we are apologetic, full of shame, sorry for ourselves? Don’t we deserve somewhere, one place at least, among our peers, where we can share these stories and feelings?

But at the same time I can see where this person is coming from. I despise myself when I feel sorry for myself – I have written about this before, the horrible vicious circle that makes it so hard to have any kind of self-love or self-belief. That’s what is so stark when I read the blog posts from Prague: how out of depth and hopeless I felt. I now know where those feelings originate from – but knowing that there’s nothing I can do to change the way I am doesn’t help.

In the ‘affirmative’ ending to my ‘Square Peg’ poem I wrote that I’ll never find a space to fit my edges unless I ‘make one for myself’. By that I am acknowledging that no one else can help me to find a way of accepting myself – I no longer fantasise about finding an ‘other half’ who will make me whole at last – but I still don’t know how to do it for myself, except, as I’ve always done, by running away and hiding .

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Walking

Friday, 07 May 2021

Writing that date jogged something in my memory, and I’ve realised what it was: my wedding anniversary, 38 years ago today.

But that’s not how I intended to start.

As far as I can remember (I was planning to start) it’s over five years since I wrote a ‘story’, by which I mean a short piece of prose with a beginning, middle and an end, worthy of submitting to an anthology, reading out loud or sharing with an online group (though I have written quite a lot of poems in that time, some of them not bad).

Sitting behind the café, with traffic passing, and dog walkers and joggers and wild swimmers, the sun is warm on my face and the wind mercifully calm. I can even hear the waves during lulls in the traffic, though to get the full impact I would have to walk down the beach past the terrace of pebbles, where there’s nowhere to sit except on the ground, and hence nowhere to write. From this vantage, I can see the sea, but not the water’s edge. I can’t even see how far the tide is in.

I’m drinking coffee from my flask. The café won’t be open till nine o’clock, as it’s a week day. I check my phone. It’s bang on eight. I don’t know whether there is anywhere else that’s open already, possibly the Coffee Cup, but I don’t like their breakfasts.

I set off to walk, in the opposite direction, heading for the pier. I pass the café and a couple of kiosks, but none of them are open.

But the pier is open, so I walk to the end, where, clearly in expectation of a busy summer (or at any rate more so than last year), more fairground rides have been erected. When I first moved here, the pier was closed for renovations, and re-opened in 2017, since when attractions have come and gone, but I don’t remember seeing this many before.

It was quite surreal, to be walking around them alone, apart from a couple of guys fishing, and one lady sitting outside the cafe at the end of the pier, who told me it would be open at nine. I leant on the railings for a while watching the sea, and the Isle of Wight ferry, then walked back along the other side of the pier and turned left on the prom.  

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Two Days in One (Again)

Wednesday, 05 May 2021

I started writing, but after about 100 words looked up and realised nothing was happening, the last couple of sentences I’d typed weren’t there. I thought I must have accidentally overwritten it, as sometimes happens when I’m not paying attention, then I found that my mouse wasn’t working, tried the touchpad on my keyboard and that wasn’t working, nothing was working, I had no cursor. I waited for a while, then tried alt-del-ctrl and that didn’t do anything either, everything was frozen, so I switched off and started it up again. When I finally got back into Word, what I’d written wasn’t autosaved, so I had to start all over again, even though I didn’t really want to write this morning anyway.

When I got home on Tuesday I called my cat a few times, but she didn’t respond. This isn’t like her, when I’ve been away she’s usually really pleased to see me, but I didn’t worry, thinking she would come out when she was ready. I spent about an hour in the kitchen, very excited to have wifi in there at last – my son installed a booster for me when he was here on Saturday, and I now have wifi in the kitchen and bedrooms, which has been a huge bugbear for me in the four years I’ve been living here. I thought she’d appear, but she didn’t, so I went round everywhere calling her name and looking in her usual hiding places. Got my dinner – and hers – then afterwards went into the front room for my evening telly-watching. Still no cat. About eight o’clock I went all round upstairs again, and in the study (I’d been in there before) I found a little face peeping out nervously from the bottom of a book case hidden in the corner behind piles of junk and stuff.

I need to do something about this room. It is so awful. I just leave it and leave it and let it get worse.

Thursday, 06 May 2021

That’s what I got to yesterday and then gave up. Maybe today I’ll just fill up what’s left. This week I don’t seem able to come up with a full 500 words on any day. The words are there, they always are, but the inner critic keeps batting them away as being too boring or too depressing or whatever.

I got a text from my daughter, asking if I want to go and stay with them after the 17th but before she goes back to work. I told her about losing and finding the cat, and about the mess in the study. She and her sister-in-law want to go away without the kids and husbands for a few days, maybe to the cabin and I have a key now, so I could get the train and she could meet me at the station. Or she might come here and help me sort out the study, then take me back with her. I sent her photos of the mess.

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Bank Holiday

My first Bank Holiday Monday in Southsea, I walked to the seafront and had breakfast sitting on the prom outside Rocksby’s, watching the sea and the boats and the Isle of Wight, the first of many (discounting one previous occasion when I went there for breakfast as a visitor); then walked along the seafront past the castle and the common to the Square Tower, where the annual ‘May Fly’ arts festival was in progress.

This year I’m with my son, daughter-in-law and the ‘boys’ (dogs) at the ‘cabin’ (the name we seem to have settled on as sounding less pretentious than the ‘lodge’) in the Surrey Hills – hopefully another ‘first of many’. I came for a couple of odd days when they first picked up the keys and for my birthday, when things were still in lockdown. Now it’s busier – the swimming pool is open, but for pre-booked sessions for single-cabin-only groups, and yesterday morning I booked a slot and had my first swim since September in Cyprus, all by myself in the empty pool. It was glorious, but the changing rooms aren’t open, so I had to walk back with my clothes on over a wet swimsuit – which was okay, apart from the seat of my jeans, which got soaked, and I hadn’t brought a spare set of bottoms because I’m travelling on the train and had shoved everything into my backpack – including my swimsuit and towel, which my son scoffed at but I really enjoyed that swim. My daughter-in-law kindly lent me a pair of trousers while they dried over the radiator.

It’s close enough for me to easily come over for a day, and I have my own key now so I can come whether or not they’re here. Admittedly it’s a hundred mile round trip, but not a bad one, mostly on the A3.

Tuesday 4 May 2021

I didn’t finish writing yesterday because the others got up and I never got back to it. So I’ll cheat today and just add to what I’ve already written.

There’s not much to say. We went out for a lovely walk across the fields in the sunshine, came back and then the weather changed and it was wild and stormy all afternoon. We played board games, laughed and got grumpy as families do. The wind is still wild now, but it’s not raining.

Going home today. It’s been a flying visit, but a peaceful one. Home today, on the train. Never want to leave, never want to go back. I don’t know how to get round that. I don’t know how to fight off the great waves of hopelessness that well up from time to time. Is there an answer? I’ve been looking for one for so long. Being with people helps sometimes; sometimes it makes it worse. Ditto being on my own, the advantage being not having to consider and deal with the reactions of others.

The wind howls around me, but the sun is still shining.